Well the RTC community is up and running, it's Christmas week so things are a bit quiet but we have 440 on Facebook.

Starting next week I'll try and get the social media streams more on track, so we won't be sharing so many funny pictures on Facebook. Each week we will try to work in tandem with 1 or 2 other Facebook pages to promote and share to each other's fanbase. Each week we will also pick a handful of bands and post pics, tour news and videos from them, again to tap into each other's fanbase.

Many thanks to all the bands that have been in touch, I will try to feature all of them in the New Year. The RTC-UK adventure is always going to have a slight bias towards UK-European acts, but we're a worldwide community so nothing is ruled out. I know we already have a lot of Mexican rockers on the Facebook page, so who are the best rock and metal bands in Mexico ? We'd love to promote and support them.

There won't be many videos on the pages from the big metal bands, we've all seen Metallica a thousand times, but you may not have seen Homicide Hagridden or Awesome Mr. Powerwolf before, so these are the sort of bands we'd like to be able to push to a wider audience.

A quick roll call of who has been in touch this week and who we will be featuring in the coming weeks - in addition to the bands named above - The Dirty Feel, NOO5E, Fisting For Glory, Unparalleled Height, Dirty Cakes Band, Aviator Shades, Beckon and more. We'll be mixing these guys in with some more bands from the world rock and metal scene - The Treatment, The Jokers, Skarlett Riot, Voodoo Six and a few more.

Lastly, don't forget to get in touch if you would like us to feature your gig or album reviews, or even band interviews.

Sunday, 22 December 2013

As part of the mission to get more rock and metal into the UK charts we would like to promote and help some of the smaller bands that you guys love and listen to. So, if there are any budding writers out there who would like to do gig or album reviews, or perhaps even interviews if you access to bands, then we would love to hear from you.

A few minor guidelines....

There is no money, I'm doing this for the love of rock and metal, so we can showcase your work, but cannot pay you.

I'd prefer to hear about a small, local band than to get a dozen reviews of Metallica, but that said, if it's good and interesting then we can print it.

Well written reviews in good English are preferred. I am sorry but at the moment we can promote writing in English. Any work printed will credit YOU as the author, and can include a link to your own blog/site if you have one.

Once accepted, we will publish your work here on the blog, and promote it via the RTC-UK Facebook, RockTheCharts on Last.fm, and @RockthechartsUK. We will also happily promote gigs, album launches and the like for bands and venues, just send us some artwork that we can post or a short press release and we'll promote it.

Numbers are still trickling in on Facebook, at the end of night on Thursday we had 400 'likes.' Twitter is a little slower, only 19 followers so far. I'm yet to decide on using other social media streams, I know that anything site we use would add to our reach, but it all adds to the time spent updating everything as well. For now then the blog, Facebook and Twitter feed will have to do.

Facebook provides all sorts of useful info for page managers including a record of how many people actually saw each post, and how many people have become actively engaged (liking, clicking links and sharing) with the page. Well overall reach and engagement are both growing steadily. Now on the strange and unexpected bits....

The country we have most fans from is...and bearing in mind that I'm trying to make this a UK chart project. Have a guess ? UK - no. USA - no. Mexico - well yes actually. That's fine, all rock and metal fans are welcome. I'm not sure how much sense Spanish speaking Mexico is making of this, but they seem to be keen on the project, Go Team Mexico! Perhaps someone could start up 'Rock The Charts Mexico' ? Give me a shout if you do.

The top 5 countries supporting RTC-UK at the moment are...

Mexico
USA
Brasil
UK
Italy

Looks like there is a lot of work to be done to gain better reach in the UK then.

Monday, 16 December 2013

OK, so I'm trying to get a thing going, just a little idea I've had knocking around inside my head, so last week I started a Facebook page and posted this...

"About - Dedicated to getting rock and metal music into the UK charts.

Description

Hi folks, what this community is about is promoting rock and metal by getting tracks into the UK and worldwide mainstream music charts. That means that once a month we're going to ask you to buy a single that we nominate on the page.

FYI - The admin has no association with any band, label or music management company. I'm doing this purely for the love of rock music and because I believe it is sadly under-represented in UK media."

Can we achieve this ? I honestly don't know, but it looks like it might be fun to give it a go and along the way I can try to share and promote some of the smaller bands that give me so much pleasure.

I started the page last week and through the week a person 'liked' it here and there. RTCUK had reached the heady heights of 12 likes by Thursday. Then we linked to some other pages in the friendly rock and metal community and the likes began to trickle in more steadily. As of this morning (Monday 16th Dec) we have a community of 200 on Facebook.

What numbers do we need ? We'd have to motivate around 8,000 people to get a previously unknown* band into the UK charts. How many people would that be on Facebook ? 20,000 ? 40,000 ? 80,000 ? I really don't know, but let's have a go anyway.

At the moment I plan to nominate a single for purchase in the last week of each calender month. As previously stated I have no formal association or financial interest in any band, label or management company, I'm just a long time rock fan, a bit of an idealist who thinks that just maybe we can make things happen.

So far so good then. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, spread the word if you can, and get in touch if you have a band we can help to promote. Let's rock together, it's an adventure!

*You know that's unknown to the general public, not to the rock fraternity :-)

We have a Twitter @RockthechartsUK, and an e-mail address rockthechartsuk@gmail.com